The mayor’s seat in Black Diamond will be up for grabs in October.
Mayor Glen Fagan announced he won’t run in this fall’s municipal election following a year in the seat.
Fagan was elected to council in a byelection in August 2016. He said he will leave the position this fall to focus on his job as a project manager for a telecom infrastructure engineering company. He plans on returning to watching council operations from the sidelines.
“I’m still very motivated to stay engaged,” he said. “I will still attend meetings – not as much as I was in the past. I will still be engaged in a number of things that are important to me and what I think is important to the community.”
Fagan resigned from the telecom infrastructure engineering company before running for mayor in last summer’s municipal byelection when former mayor Sharlene Brown was hired as the Town’s chief administrative officer. He said the company made him an offer he couldn’t refuse shortly after he was elected and he’s worked for it part-time since.
Fagan said he couldn’t carry on doing both.
“It was a difficult decision but it’s just a complication of two jobs,” he said. “I work 20 to 25 hours on an average week, sometimes up to 40. The Town works me anywhere from 15 to 25 hours a week.”
Fagan was part of a concerned taxpayers group that sought to put taxes and financial issues in the spotlight. He attended council meetings regularly for about two years before being elected as mayor.
Fagan feels satisfied with council’s recent achievements. He said he’s created more transparency between council and citizens through a monthly coffee and conversation round table session where the public can informally ask questions of council.
“I’ve seen council open up quite a bit, start asking more questions and be more engaged than what I’ve seen the previous two years watching council meetings,” he said. “I got that feedback from the community itself.”
In the past year, council focused on projects like repairing infrastructure to reduce water loss, conducting an operational budget review to expedite future budgeting processes and completing a bridge and trail system in the town’s southwest, a pump track and the amalgamation feasibility study in conjunction with Turner Valley.
“I’m going to miss being there,” said Fagan. “I really enjoyed the community engagement – meeting people, finding out what they wanted to see in the community. If I wasn’t working, I would be running for council. I might still do it once I retire.”
Fagan said one goal he was unable to obtain was reducing municipal taxes.
“I believe we could have achieved that but council’s decision was not to go in that direction even though I did vote against the operational budget increases,” he said. “We did get a contingency fund (for infrastructure emergencies), which is something I wanted to see.”
Coun. Brian Marconi was also elected during last summer’s byelection and was surprised when he learned Fagan wasn’t running this fall.
“Glen’s announcement caught everybody off guard,” he said. “We didn’t’ see that coming.”
Marconi said he and Fagan shared many of the same philosophies.
“We thought there is a way to do things differently and maybe we could impart that from the corporate world,” he said. “We worked fairly well together.”
Marconi said Fagan’s time on council has made an impact in just one year.
“There was substantial change amongst council members because people were starting to think independently,” he said. “Glen encouraged everybody to speak their minds.”
Marconi said Fagan attended almost every committee at least once to learn as much as he could.
“In time he would have started bringing more of those learnings into more council meetings,” he said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t get to do everything he wanted to do.”
